Did you know.
Before you became a mother — before the test, before the kicks, before the moment your body split open and someone else's life began — did you know how much it would take?
Not the sleep. They told you about the sleep. Not the body. They told you about that too, sort of — the stretch marks, the weight, the parts of you that would never quite return to what they were. They told you the surface version. The Instagram version. The version that fits into a caption with a postpartum body photo and a message about self-love.
Did you know it would take your self?
Did you know your nervous system would become the very fabric that forms your child's connection to the entire world? That your regulation would become her regulation. That your breath would teach her breathing before she ever had language for calm.
Did you know that your anxiety would move through her body like weather — that she would feel it in her stomach before you'd even named it in yours?
Did you know that the woman you spent thirty years building — her ambitions, her edges, her careful architecture of identity — would dissolve? Not gently. Not with ceremony. But in the middle of a Tuesday, in a pile of laundry, with the sound of crying coming from two rooms and one of them yours.
Did you know you would grieve her? The woman you were before. That you would miss her like a friend who moved away without saying goodbye. That some mornings you'd catch a glimpse of her — in a song, in a memory, in the way you used to move through the world without listening for another heartbeat — and the missing would knock the wind out of you.
Did you know the guilt would come from every direction. Working too much. Not working enough. Being present but exhausted. Being energized but absent. Feeding her the wrong thing. Feeding her the right thing but not the way the article said. Losing your patience. Keeping your patience so perfectly it felt like performance. The guilt of doing it alone. The guilt of wanting help. The guilt of being helped and still feeling like it's not enough.
Did you know.
And yet.
Even when you no longer get a full night's sleep. Even when you barely eat your meals warm. Even when you collapse into bed sometimes before brushing your own teeth — you still wake up. Show up. Hold her. Smile when she needs the smile. Breathe when she needs the breath. Be the safe space. The encouraging face. The warm embrace.
You show up shattered and still somehow whole enough for her. And in those moments — the ones no one sees, the ones that happen between midnight and dawn on the living room floor — you discover what you're made of.
Not what you thought you were made of. Not the credentials or the ambitions or the identity you spent decades polishing. Something underneath all of that. Something that was waiting for exactly this dismantling to finally be revealed.
Did you know the rebuilding would be the most sacred work of your life?
That the woman who emerges from this — the one being built right now, in stolen moments, in the cracks between being needed — is not a lesser version of who you were. She's the version that knows what she's actually made of. The version that's been to the floor and gotten back up so many times her legs don't shake anymore.
Did you know almost no one would see it happening?
That the most profound transformation of your life would occur in the kitchen. At the sink. In the car between drop-off and the driveway. In the three minutes of silence before someone needs you again. That the initiation wouldn't come with a certificate or a retreat or a teacher. It would come with a small hand reaching for yours and the entire world rearranging itself around that touch.
I didn't know. Not really. Not the way I know now.
I know now that motherhood is not a chapter. It's a threshold — and you don't get to go back through it. The woman who walked in doesn't walk out. Someone new does. Someone fiercer. Someone softer. Someone who can hold more than she ever imagined because she had no choice but to learn.
If you're in it right now — in the dissolving, in the rebuilding, in the sacred exhaustion of becoming someone you don't fully recognize yet — I see you.
Not the version you perform. The real one. The one on the floor. The one still showing up.
She's the strongest woman in the room. And she doesn't even know it yet.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.